Gmail Marks Five Years In Beta

TrekkieTechie writes "Though in fact the big day was April 1st, Google celebrated the five-year anniversary of the popular online email service Gmail with a post on the service's blog, saying 'we want to give a big thank you to all of you who use Gmail every day, to those who've been around since the beginning, to those who were using an AJAX app before the term AJAX was popular, to those who started chatting right in your email ... we couldn't have gotten here without you.' The milestone has also prompted speculation about when, if ever, Gmail will lose its beta status, and Ars Technica recently sat down with Todd Jackson, Gmail's Project Manager, to discuss the reasoning behind that nagging beta label."

Comments

Beta?

[Bored Grammar Nazi]

The milestone has also prompted speculation about when, if ever, Gmail will lose its beta status, and Ars Technica recently sat down with Todd Jackson, Gmail's Project Manager, to discuss the reasoning behind that nagging beta label.

Whatever the reason, it certainly is making people talk about it.

Re:Beta?

[palegray.net]

Look, I keep trying to explain this, but nobody wants to listen to reason. Google's engineering population contains a high percentile of gamers, and they're not taking Gmail out of beta until Duke Nukem Forever is released. Geez, it's the second Slashdot story today I've had to comment in to point out these obvious parallels to the sinister ties between extreme gaming and our everyday lives.

Re:Beta?

[AvitarX]

Witht he changes they have been making I actually feel the quality is degrading.

It has a lot of nice new features, but it feels like it is hanging a lot more often too.

It actually now feels more, not less like a beta to me.

Re:Beta?

[elrous0]

Maybe Gmail 1.0 is sort of like Warp 10--something that can never actually be reached. By the time it ends, it will be up to Beta release version 0.99999997

Still in beta?

[Kuroji]

Well, despite that a lot of Google's products seem to still have the beta tag, it also means that they aren't necessarily going to be held to the same standard. For example, when Gmail decides to up and die for a few hours while they upgrade.

Re:Still in beta?

[v1]

GMail has imap, though you have to deliberately turn it on (it's off by default) and the switch isn't exactly glaringly obvious.

I believe the reason it's still "beta" is right now a LOT of people are using it as NON beta, for business, other important uses, or perhaps it's their only email address. Google probably knows that there's always that 1-in-1000 chance that something they do will break it in a way that causes data loss, or scrambles things badly enough for a few users that there won't be any reasonable way to fix it short of reset their mailboxes. When this happens, having the "beta" tag still on it will soften the public backlash a lot.

There's a couple ISPs in this area that have horrid email systems. One of them (Qwest) farmed out their email to MSN Live last year, and that has been an unrelenting nightmare for their customers. Whenever they approach us to help with their email, we convert them to gmail, and all of their problems instantly go away. That was after spending TWO hours on the phone being bounced between MSN and Qwest, each telling us that all the issues were the other's problem. We're very thankful to have GMail as an alternative to give to our customers.

GMail also happens to be the only imap email account I have, which is probably unusual since I have six of them, but that makes it something I can access from my ipod touch, which is a nice bonus. (yes it does pop too but you can't do concurrent pop on multiple computers without headaches)

I really do hope they keep it going, though I could personally care less if it never loses the "beta" tag.

Why?

[Jurily]

Does it matter if it's beta when it's still the best and most reliable free email service around?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Humanity is still in Beta and most people don't seem to mind that.

Re:Why?

[Thanshin]

Does it matter if it's beta when it's still the best and most reliable free email service around?

Quite the opposite.

When a friend told me he was closing a beta phase my first question was "Is it more stable than gmail?"

Re:Why?

[codeButcher]

Humanity is still in Beta

... and that is probably flattering yourself.

Re:Why?

[gusmao]

You could say that not now.

Generally, the beta version is a prototype of the product that comes even before the release candidates. People don't usually pay for beta releases, and it's very uncommon for a product to remain so long in beta, especially when it is already stable, widely deployed and used daily by millions of users.

This curious fact generate especulations about the reasons for that, since so far, no good one was given. What if they decided for instance, that when Gmail is out of beta, the service will be no longer be free and a subscription model will be put in place? Or that the current storage will be available only for premium users? Or that the service will be simply discontinued? The beta versioning could easily provide an excuse for any of those or other changes that could directly impact you, especially after you come to rely strongly on the service.

Re:Why?

[Darth_brooks]

Is that why so many "Alpha Male" types are knuckle dragging meat heads?

Re:Why?

[dirk]

It matters because it weakens the meaning of being in beta and confuses users. It used to be that beta was for testing. If you downloaded and installed a beta product, it was understood that there would be bugs and problems and they should be reported. With Google using beta as a constant tag (I remember ICQ used to do this back in the day to), users don't have a clear understanding of what a beta is anymore. They think beta is just a new product and don't expect bugs and don't report them. Open beta is a much harder thing to get useful information from if people judge your beta product just like they would a finished product, which is what is beginning to happen with places like Google tagging regular released like beta releases.

Re:Why?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Frankly, I'd much rather have Outlook be gone, for several reasons:

  - Gmail is pretty solidly technically superior, in most of the ways we care about. Example: It doesn't fall over if you put several hundred thousand emails in the same "folder".

  - Gmail moves the data off of the end-user's computer. Far, far too many Outlook setups (especially in small businesses) store everything locally, with no backup -- one hard drive crash away from all that archived email gone.

  - Gmail is platform-agnostic. It's actually annoyingly browser-aware, but all browsers are supported somewhat, and among the fully-supported browsers are Firefox and Safari, and Gecko and Webkit both exist for every platform I care about. That's one baby-step closer to Linux on the corporate desktop.

  - Google actually seems to support open standards -- for example, Gmail includes GTalk, which operates over Jabber. Email is available via IMAP, and calendars via caldav. Contrast to Outlook/Exchange -- the Halloween documents show that Microsoft deliberately chose proprietary protocols, as well as proprietary extensions/perversions of existing protocols.

Now, I'd still prefer we all start improving the existing open implementations, and get to where this is entirely open standard, commodity stuff, just like IMAP and SMTP is today. But Gmail would be a marked improvement over Outlook, in many ways.

Re:Why?

[Jurily]

- Gmail moves the data off of the end-user's computer. Far, far too many Outlook setups (especially in small businesses) store everything locally, with no backup -- one hard drive crash away from all that archived email gone.

Sysadmins not doing backup is one thing, but how is surrendering all your data because it's convenient better?

Re:Why?

[Jurily]

I had a longer post written, but then I realized you've got a gmail.com address obfuscated up there. Clearly you think the benefits are worth any real or imagined loss of privacy.

My internet persona is not a company.

What a coincidence...

[VinylRecords]

This also marks the five year anniversary of me not using HotMail or Outlook Express.

Re:What a coincidence...

[robot_love]

I read that as "Wordpress made me abandon monogamy".

I thought, "I must look into this 'Wordpress'".

Tag

[daniduclos]

A Beta tag only makes sense if there is a "final" release planned at some point in the future. If it's going to be forever in Beta, it becomes meaningless, just like those web pages of 1999 with an eternal "under construction" gif.

Re:Tag

[Starayo]

Hey! I'm going to finish it one day!

Gmail is Effective .

[ajay_walia]

Beta no Beta it has been a Good experience using Gmail . Moreover it changed the Market freeing us of Quota's . . . .

Re:Gmail is a sandbox

[Thanshin]

f()?

crap.

P.S.: f() -> f(Greek small letter beta) ...

I'll go back to my cave.

Beta is meaningless

[krou]

Generally, any usage of the Beta tag is meaningless in the world of web-based applications. In fact, it's meaningless for most web-pages. The reason is very simple: a site should be constantly working to improve and change. The change that happens is not bound by the traditional software version release, either. All websites are, by default, in a perpetual beta, whether its users know it or not, which makes the label itself meaningless.

Wash your hands clean of it...

[greedom]

Google is notorious for keeping most of it's apps in the Beta stages because if it works, it's considered a fantastic app and when some hacker finds a huge security flaw in it or something of that nature, Google can just throw up their hands and say "Hey, it's still in Beta".

Re:Earliest adopter? (outside Google)

[u38cg]

No, but I could beat you with a stick made of pure solidified smugness. How's that for ya?